Philip Gourevitch, editor of The Paris Review

Italian novelist and scholar Umberto Eco has 30 000 books in his Milan appartment and another 20 000 volumes in his country manor.

The author of Foucault's Pendulum and The Name of the Rose is a man of prodigious intellect, fluent in several languages, with an encylopedic knowledge of medieval history.

So you'd never guess what il professore likes to watch on TV. He likes Starsky and Hutch - the clunky, at times slapstick 1970s police buddy drama featuring two badly dressed Califorian cops in need of a good haircut.

Umberto Eco's taste in TV is one of the more trivial things to emerge from a long and fascinating interview with the author published in the current edition of the literary magazine The Paris Review.

The latest issue also includes a moving recollection of a friendship by novelist and children's writer Paula Fox and the diary of fire lookout, who spends his summers watching for smoke a tower on top of a mountain in a New Mexico national park.